Film Noir
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Film Noir is a critical term used to describe cynical Hollywood thrillers and melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, it refers to the high-contrast and deeply-shadowed lighting style of such films. Film noir is not necessarily a type of genre but rather a tone that branched from the crime and gangster sags of the 1930's. It has certain elements such as crime, greed, and violence that are supposed to represent the same type of evils in society and of course a moral conflict at the base of the plot. The characters in film noir are normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes. Film noir is also a term used to describe the large body of films in America in the period of 1941-58, generally they focus on urban crime and corruption. It wasn't until Post-war, France got a chance to see many American films. The French observed the relationship between American movies in the forties and literature called "roman noir", which means dark literature and film noir means black film.
The term was not used very much in production and only French critics used it during the noir era. Now the term is used universally but it is still a very much debated topic...